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First step for successful installation of CentOS (or RHEL/Fedora) on ALIX board is to use Microdrive instead of CompactFlash card, so you won’t have to worry about CF write cycles. Microdrives go now for $10-20 on eBay. Definitely worth it. I used 2.5GB Seagate ST625211CF Microdrive, but I believe any other will do too.

Then you will need regular PC and IDE to CF adapder. Connect the adapter as first hard disk and install on it Linux distribution of your choice. And yes, you can create swap partition since it’s Microdrive and not CompactFlash.

Another option is to use USB card reader instead of IDE to CF adapter or VMware instead of real PC. Or connect Microdrive to another Linux machine and use yum –installroot same way it done with Xen domU images.

Any way, after Linux is installed don’t forget to enable serial console.

Despite Geode LX800 is i586 compatible CPU and CentOS/RHEL comes with i686 kernel it will boot. The only problem I’ve noticed so far is when you try to install kernel update it will complain “package kernel-2.6.18-128.1.16.el5.i686 is intended for a i686 architecture”. Fix it by:

# echo i686-redhat-linux > /etc/rpm/platform

By the way, we can also use Voyage Linux kernel. Just copy /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-486-voyage and /lib/modules/2.6.26-486-voyage and create initrd image: